Michael A. Walsh
NY Post
4/28/2011
Having lost the House of Representa tives in the last election, the Obama administration is now imposing “fundamental change” via executive order, regulatory fiat and political pressure. Talk about the unitary executive:
* The Environmental Protection Agency has ruled that Shell Oil Co. may not drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Circle off Alaska, where an estimated 27 billion barrels of domestic oil are waiting to be extracted.
Never mind that Shell’s already spent nearly $4 billion on the project, including $2.2 billion to Uncle Sam for the leases. No, the EPA’s appeals board said the oil giant had failed to include possible greenhouse-gas emissions from an icebreaking vessel in its calculations and that the project might somehow threaten the health of the 245 people in an Eskimo village 70 miles away.
So, thanks to a Nixon-era regulatory agency, our dependence on foreign oil will rise and gas prices will continue their relentless climb.
* Continuing President Obama’s war on domestic oil production, the Fish and Wildlife Service is considering the three-inch Dunes Sagebrush Lizard for inclusion on the endangered species list — a decision that could spell doom for two of Texas’s top oil-producing counties. And right behind the lizard is the Lesser Prairie Chicken…
…* In a move to end-run the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United ruling, which held that corporations have the same free-speech rights as individuals, the White House is drafting an executive order that would require private companies with federal business to disclose contributions to independent political groups. (They already have to report candidate donations.)
So it’s an attempt to accomplish by ukase what Democrats failed to do last year when Congress rejected the Disclose Act. And, naturally, public-employee unions would be exempt…
The entire article is at the NY Post.
